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Tuesday, 31 January 2012

Baby, it's cold outside.

It's snowing in Istanbul and a very brisk Northerly wind is blowing all the cold air down to us. We are living in our embarrassingly dilapidated Bodrum house. It was a in a bit of a mess when we bought it 17 years ago to use as an office and then hardly lived in at all while we were out of the country. Progress has been made this month and the house is now water-tight and warm everywhere except the bathroom, which has no heating at all. With night temperatures just over freezing point, the morning shower is bracing. We have plenty of hot water, but a great deal of will power has to be summoned up to turn the hot water off and make the dash to the warm bedroom. I think this is the first time in our married life that we've had a cold bathroom. Our first little house in Bodrum had a wood-fired water boiler inside the shower room. It took half an hour to get a good blaze going under the water tank, which brought the shower room itself up to about 40 degrees. Then hot water could be syphoned off from the tank and mixed with cold. It was our own tiny Turkish Bath. It was also quite smokey and the ash had to be cleared out every day, a job which left me needing a shower!

About Me

In early 1982 I boarded a Turkish Kibris flight to Izmir - my destination was a 29 foot sloop in Bodrum's new marina. At 22, my belongings fitted into a worse for wear sailing holdall. In 2012 I made a similar journey from Heathrow to Bodrum. Thirty years have passed and Bodrum has changed. There are plenty of very good blogs detailing the ex-pat journey through modern Turkey. The aim of this one is to catch sight of past Turkey through my experience of re-settling in modern Bodrum.